He laughed uneasily.
"The people," she went on, "who are sure of me; who think I'm so easy to know. They don't know me, and they don't know that I know them. And they're the only people I've ever, ever met. I can tell what they're going to say before they've said it. It's always the same thing. It's—if you like—the inevitable thing. If you can't have anything but the same thing, at least you like it put a little differently. You'd think, among them all, they might find it easy to put it a little differently sometimes; but they never do; and it's the brutal monotony of it that I cannot stand."
"I suppose," said Lucy, "people are monotonous."
"They don't know," said she, evidently ignoring his statement as inadequate, "they don't know how sick I am of it—how insufferably it bores me."
"Ah! there you see—that's what I'm afraid of."
"What?"
"Of saying the wrong thing—the—the same thing."
"That's it. You'd say it differently, and it wouldn't be the same thing at all. And what's more, I should never know whether you were going to say it or not."
"There's one thing I'd like to say to you if I knew how—if I knew how you'd take it. You see, though I think I know you——" he hesitated.
"You don't really? You don't know who I am? Or where I come from? Or where I'm going to? I don't know myself."